Abstract [en]

Background: Pressures from stakeholders drive manufacturers to be more environmental committed. The demand and supply integration (DSI) aims at balancing the demand and supply in order to stay competitive and reduce costs which can help manufacturers decreasing production costs for environmental-friendly products. When a company is integrating and disseminating information, trust is expected to play an important role between the supply chain partners.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate, theoretically and empirically, of how environmental commitment and trust can influence DSI within the German textile manufacturing industry.

Methodology: The primary data, in this thesis, was conducted using a structured web survey sent out to 982 German textile manufacturers via email, based on the database Orbis. The response rate was 5.6 per cent. The simple linear regression analysis was used in order to investigate the relation of environmental commitment and trust on the extent of DSI.

Findings, conclusions: In the German textile manufacturing industry, on the one hand, the results indicated that there is a positive linear relation of environmental commitment on the extent of DSI. Due to the low response rate and the lack of previous studies, further research should be conducted to confirm this relation. On the other hand, trust somewhat influences the extent of DSI, however, no linear relationship is found between them. The result is not in coherence with previous research. Hence, further studies are needed to clarify this relation.